World-Building Without a Building Permit

Before I get started, I want to make clear that this isn’t a “grognard hates narrative games” post. Quite the opposite. I love narrative play. Our group will sometimes play an entire session without rolling the dice at all, and we usually love it. We talk to NPCs, argue among ourselves, investigate something, make plans, or just follow whatever strange conversational rabbit hole we find ourselves in. That’s one of the things I love about RPGs. 

What I’ve noticed, though, is a trend in newer games toward codifying some of those things that traditionally happened outside the rules: collaborative world-building, interpersonal arguments, relationships, emotional conflicts, and even the process of establishing facts about the setting. Games like The Quiet Year, Fate, or Cortex Prime take various approaches to this, and I can certainly see the appeal. Rules for narration can give everyone a chance to participate, prevent the loudest person at the table from becoming the de facto author, and create prompts to get things moving when a group might otherwise stare at a proverbial blank page. Depending on how you like to play, then formalizing those things may be the right choice. I’m not trying to argue that people shouldn’t enjoy these games. If they produce the experience you want, great.

What I find myself wondering, though, is why many games increasingly seem to assume that everything interesting that could occur during an RPG needs to become a game mechanic. In our group, collaborative storytelling and dramatic interaction just happen. There is a difference, to my mind, between rules that facilitate roleplaying and rules that regulate roleplaying. Combat needs rules because we need some impartial way to determine whether the fighter hits the monster. But if my character insults the duke, I’m not convinced we necessarily need an “argument resolution system.” I can insult the duke, the GM can decide how the duke reacts, and then we can have an actual argument. Likewise, I don’t think collaborative world-building necessarily needs a specific procedure. A game can certainly say, “anyone can add something to the setting,” without saying, “on your turn, you must establish one new fact about the setting.” The latter risks putting people on the spot, especially if they’re shy or not very creative. I’m much more interested in rules creating situations that give us something to roleplay about than rules telling us how to roleplay once we get there.

This is especially true of world-building. I think some of the best world-building in a long-running campaign happens almost accidentally, through accumulation. Everyone realizes that the party has been to the same bar three times, so eventually the bar gets a name. Then the bartender gets a name, then a personality, then maybe a family, then a problem, and six months later that bartender is somehow an important NPC. Nobody sat down and collaboratively designed him. The world acquired detail naturally, over time. The same thing can happen with history, geography, relationships, and all sorts of other things. Collaborative world-building certainly can be a deliberate activity, and I enjoy games that make it a major part of the game. But I don’t think such collaboration can really be forced, and I think it can feel unnatural or contrived if a group tries to do it before the game actually starts. If everyone at the table is comfortable contributing, it will happen naturally over time. And if they aren’t, giving them a rule that says they must contribute doesn’t necessarily make them more creative or more comfortable.

Over 40+ years of gaming, I’ve learned that my preference is for leaving some parts of an RPG deliberately “unmechanized.” Rules are useful when we need them to resolve uncertainty, settle disagreements, or create interesting challenges. But I don’t think every part of the experience needs to be converted into a procedure simply because we could make a procedure for it. There is something valuable about trusting the people at the table to talk, imagine, improvise, argue, invent, and occasionally surprise one another without consulting a subsystem. That is just my own preference--I certainly don’t think it should be some objective law of RPG design, and if a friend wanted to run a game with mechanized world-building and narration, I’d play it. In fact, I can understand perfectly well why someone would prefer a game where those things are explicitly supported by the rules. But more and more, I find myself increasingly convinced that an RPG can have rules for playing the game while leaving some room for the people playing it to simply…play.